Journalistic Quotes

• Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault.

  Henry Anatole Grunwald

  Echoes, Faults, Triumph

  "WikiLeaks and the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity" by James Moore, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 3, 2010.

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• The biggest journalistic game-changer of our time has been the rise of social media and the overgrowth of faux news sources - league- and team-sponsored blogs, player tweets, fanboy sites, rumor mills - churning bits of information and speculation into a clattering fog storm. Who will cut through the drivel and whim-wham to tell us what's really going on?

  Robert Lipsyte

  Team, Cutting, Player

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• By journalistic custom and D.C. law, of course, reporters don't carry guns to news conferences -- and certainly not when the person at the lectern is the NRA's Asa Hutchinson, an unremarkable former congressman and Bush administration official whom most reporters couldn't pick out of a lineup. But the NRA wasn't going to leave any doubt about its superior firepower.

  Dana Milbank

  Gun, Law, Doubt

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• A good journalistic organisation upholds four values: inform, reflect, crusade, connect.

  Jane Eisner

  Four, Crusades, Judaism

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• There's a whole journalistic-industrial complex dedicated to keeping newsprint, TV screens and radio waves clean of destabilizing scoops damaging to corporations or the state.

  Alexander Cockburn

  Radio Waves, Corporations, Tvs

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• Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it. ... What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story.

  Meg Greenfield

  Drama, Simple, Reality

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• I'm not trying to be in your face and take a picture that is like a journalistic kind of image. I got interested in a kind of complicated, compiled, visual field.

  Teju Cole

  Trying, Fields, Faces

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Some objects and events may be photographed, others, if one is to render their true quality, should be painted or set to music, since their essence is more faithfully reproduced through imagination than by the journalistic report.

  Ilka Chase

  Photography, Essence, Imagination

  Ilka Chase (1951). “New York 22: that district of the City which lies between Fiftieth and Sixtieth Streets, Fifth Avenue, and the East River”

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• Sometimes in news photography and so on, the pictures are a little bit dry, and put on the page and just set in a journalistic way in front of you.

  Chris Hondros

  Photography, News, Dry

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• I definitely divide my life into decades. Almost every ten years, something in my work life has changed. My twenties were my journalistic phase, then there was my screenwriting phase, then I became a director, then I started doing some plays.

  Nora Ephron

  Years, Play, Twenties

  Interview with Kathryn Borel, believermag.com. March 1, 2012.

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• It has been said that a rolling stone gathers no moss. I would add that sometimes a rolling stone also gathers no verifiable facts or even the tiniest morsels of journalistic integrity.

  Ed Helms

  Integrity, Facts, Moss

  "Ed Helms Destroys Rolling Stone’s Rape Story Scandal During UVA Valedictory Speech". Ed Helms' speech at the University of Virginia’s Valedictory Exercises, Charlottesville, Virginia, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 15, 2015.

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• By a twist of fate rather than anything approaching journalistic enterprise, I did the last major interview with Johnny Carson.

  Tom Shales

  Fate, Twists, Lasts

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• I think people always appreciate somebody else's informed educated opinion. To the degree that anybody with a computer can offer a journalistic point of view whether or not they have a degree, it sort of alters the validity of you have to place on anyone's individual comment.

  Seth Green

  Thinking, Views, People

  "Interview: Seth Green talks ‘Dads’ controversy". Interview with Liane Bonin Starr, uproxx.com. September 17, 2013.

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• There's a difference between using the word to insult somebody and using it to start a journalistic conversation.

  Juan Williams

  Differences, Insult, Conversation

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word 'renowned'... I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative... Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International.

  Geoffrey K. Pullum

  Book, Reading, Thinking

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• In another life, before taking the veil of journalistic purity, I practiced the black arts of a political operative, including 'debate prep.

  Jeff Greenfield

  Art, Political, Black

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• In those simpler days, you could just take pictures of movie stars and show them the way they were, as normal human beings. And if I felt part of any movement at the time, it was just to do that - to be journalistic and photograph what is, rather than what is made up.

  Elliott Erwitt

  Stars, Movement, Way

  "The intimacy of strangers" by Leo Benedictus, www.theguardian.com. June 6, 2008.

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• For decades, the journalistic norm had been that the private lives of public officials remained private unless that life impinged on public performance.

  Roger Mudd

  Norm, Performances, Private Life

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• Withholding information that would get innocent people killed was the right thing to do, not a journalistic sin.

  Eason Jordan

  People, Information, Sin

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• Most centrist Democrats... try to distance themselves from controversies that recall the 1960s. There are journalistic centrists as well, who avoid hard truths for the sake of acceptance and legitimacy.

  Tom Hayden

  Distance, Acceptance, Trying

  Tom Hayden (2008). “Writings For A Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader”, City Lights Publishers

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• I think that if you feel imaginatively towards a subject, you really shouldn't do it in a journalistic context, because then you're just fabricating, and that's crazy.

  Hilton Als

  Crazy, Thinking, Feels

  "Hilton Als, Constructing Genre". Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 5, 2013.

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• For an academic to launch a public conversation about journalistic integrity, the role of religion in society, scholarship and faith is a dream come true. These are the kinds of things that we sit around talking to each other about in our dusty libraries. To see these conversations take place in popular culture is the best thing that could have ever happened.

  Reza Aslan

  Dream, Integrity, Talking

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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• You learn nothing if you carry with you a journalistic system of values, which is invented to save reporters from experience.

  Kenneth Rexroth

  Reporters, Ifs, Values

  Kenneth Rexroth (1969). “An autobiographical novel”

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• Journalistic content is a technical complex expressly intended to adapt man to the machine.

  Jacques Ellul

  Men, Machines, Complexes

  "The Technological Society". Book by Jacques Ellul, translated by John Wilkinson, p. 96, 1964.

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• It goes to show you how we in the press so often miss the big stories that are right under our noses. There is a famous journalistic legend about the time a young reporter covered the Johnstown flood of 1889. The kid wrote: God sat on a hillside overlooking Johnstown today and looked at the destruction He had wrought. His editor cabled back: Forget flood. Interview God.

  Roger Ebert

  Kids, Editors, Missing

  Roger Ebert (2013). “Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2007”, p.297, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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